Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Asia Battles Drug-Resistant Malaria

An
anopheles mosquito, the only mosquito species that carries and
transmits malaria to humans, is seen in a microscope at a malaria
research facility in Timika, Papua. (JG Photo/Jurnasyanto Sukarno)

Sydney. Drug-resistant malaria is
spreading in Asia, experts warned as a high-level conference opened
Wednesday with the aim of hammering out an action plan to strengthen
the region’s response.

Resistance to the drug used everywhere to
cure the life-threatening disease has emerged in Cambodia, Thailand and
Myanmar, said Richard Feachem, director of global health at the
University of California, San Francisco.

“In the Mekong Basin
there is a growing and spreading problem of resistance... to the drug
artemisinin which is the front-line drug worldwide,” he said ahead of
“Malaria 2012: Saving Lives in the Asia-Pacific” in Sydney.

“I
think we’ve undoubtedly slowed it down, the international efforts have
undoubtedly had a positive effect, but as far as we can tell it is
still growing and it is still spreading.

“The danger is that at
some time this resistance may break out of Southeast Asia and crop up
in Africa,” added Feachem, the former founding head of the Global Fund
to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Some 22 countries in
the Asia-Pacific still have malaria, but enormous progress has been
made in combating the devastating disease with the number of infections
falling by about 50 percent in the past decade, he said.

Yet
there were still an estimated 30 million cases in the Asia-Pacific in
2010, and more than 40,000 deaths in Southeast Asia and the Western
Pacific, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Drug-resistant
malaria was found on the Thailand-Cambodia border eight years ago, and
has also been found along the Thailand-Myanmar frontier and in parts of
Vietnam, prompting an urgent call for action from the WHO in September.

The
Sydney conference of politicians, scientists and health experts will
seek consensus on the actions needed to strengthen the region’s
response to malaria.

Fatoumata Nafo-Traore, who leads the Roll
Back Malaria Partnership which aims to provide a coordinated global
approach to fighting the disease, said the resistance was most
troubling in border areas.

“The current concern is that even
though it is localized in those border areas, there is a potential to
have it spreading to other parts of the world, because of the
population inflow, because of the migrant workers and so on,” she told
AFP.

“This is really why we are getting concerned, because this
is the only class of anti-malarial drug available to cure all
uncomplicated malaria cases.”

Resistance to artemisinin
currently does not prevent patients being cured, thanks to other drugs
it is used in concert with, but treatment typically takes longer than
normal.

It is not known why the resistance has emerged in
Cambodia, one of the first countries to deploy the treatment some 30
years ago.

But Ric Price, from the Centre of Tropical Medicine
at Oxford in Britain, said high levels of counterfeit drugs and people
not taking the full course of treatment could be factors.

“Artemisinin
still remains the treatment of choice but it’s under threat and we have
to monitor where those areas are, where it is declining,” he said.

The
conference will discuss the need for vigilance against malaria, with
Feachem saying there had been numerous cases in the past when the
disease had almost been eradicated but complacency saw it come sweeping
back.

“It’s the penalty of success,” he said. “Some countries in
the region now have very little malaria. When you’re down to 100 cases
a year, the politicians [lose interest] and malaria comes surging back.”

He
said one of the conference goals was for half of the malaria-afflicted
countries in the Asia-Pacific to eradicate the disease by 2025.

“That would be a huge historic step forward,” he said.

Malaria
is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted
through the bites of infected mosquitoes. It killed an estimated
655,000 people in 2010, mostly African children.